The Marketing Essentials: Website UX
Let’s be honest––we’re in the world of online business. Without a great UX website, your product or service will suffer, and you may not achieve the sales or customer retention rates you want. By implementing seamless, functional, and aesthetically pleasing UX design on your website, you’re providing positive experiences that keep a user loyal to your product and brand.
What is UX?
But let’s take a step back––what even is UX? UX stands for “user experience” and refers to everything that affects a user’s interaction with a digital product. It encompasses everything from a landing page, website, the product itself, the consumer journey, the community, the service, all of it — as experienced by users.
For designers, UX design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful, relevant, and flexible experiences to users. This involves the whole design process of collecting and uniting the product, including aspects like branding, design, usability, accessibility, and functionality.
Here, we’ll be looking at home décor company Lulu and Georgia and its UX design as it pertains to the overall function and usability of its e-commerce site for consumers. I’ve broken this down into three categories: functionality, aesthetics, and content.
Functionality for Users
The company has made its website easy to navigate through user-friendly filters, including home décor aesthetic preferences, collections, categories, prices ranges, and more. Below the two main pictures at the top of the homepage is a “Shop by Category” function, where users can quickly choose which product category they want to visit. Below this is another product category function but is accompanied by pictures representing the category. Further down the homepage is the brand’s Instagram gallery where users can shop the products shown. The layout and placement of images on the homepage render the site user-centered and a pleasure to use, as consumers can easily browse categories and view the images that showcase the style, beauty, and range of Lulu and Georgia products.
A navigation menu appears horizontally across the top of all internal pages. With categories such as New, Outdoor, Rugs, Furniture, Lighting, and many more, the navigation menu gives users a seamless and easily navigable way to browse, which improves the chances of them taking action on the site. This is very useful since home décor encompasses many types of products and organizing the goods by product, room (kitchen vs. bathroom), and. Lastly, within each category, users can choose whether to look at New Furniture, Bestsellers, Trending Now, Collection, and more.
Lulu and Georgia’s mobile UX is similarly useful and compatible to mobile browsing. Of special note is the “Shop by Category” function under the main image, where users scroll their thumb right to left to view the categories. The navigation menu appears on the left-hand side and opening the menu provides clear and easy-to-read categories.
Overall, the company’s desktop and mobile sites employ responsive design, a design approach that suggests UX design should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation. Consumers’ needs as it pertains to the organization and layout of home décor products are addressed and implemented in the site’s UX design.
However, the site could make better use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for customer service. In place of an AI chatbot, the site has a “Contact us” function in which customer concerns are addressed via email. Implementing an AI chatbot would enhance the customer experience and operations in that it can handle multiple queries at once, which saves time and manpower and helps the customer address issues more efficiently.
Aesthetics for the Win
Lulu and Georgia deserve an A+ on its visuals and aesthetics. The brand is big on neutral pieces and a vintage design, and the homepage greets you with pictures that are earthy and organic in tone and with great emphasis on textiles, textures, and the use of light. The site gives off a bohemian, chic vintage, and eclectic vibe, which perfectly matches the brand’s personality. Its target market is professional women who don’t have the time to shop for a large variety of products. The site’s aesthetics target the modern woman and help her envision her space and feel inspired and confident in her design and product choices.
However, when it comes to design innovation, the brand’s website designers could explore more ways to make the site fun to explore. For example, it might be interesting to implement an interactive mood board or slide show where users can seamlessly browse images of the products in a home and different aesthetics and styles that come with mixing and matching the pieces. This would be another way to showcase the products and make them attractive to consumers.
Content is Vital
Content marketing is an essential marketing powerhouse for every business in every industry. I cannot stress the importance of content marketing in its ability to increase the volume of quality traffic to a website. Content is king (and queen) in creating awareness and generating quality leads which sustains healthy sales growth.
Lulu and Georgia go above and beyond other home furniture and décor companies by implementing a blog called Stories. Lulu and Georgia’s Stories contain blog posts from a wide variety of topics, such as interviews, behind the scenes, entertainment, home tours, and design advice. Each blog––no matter which topic it covers––revolves around the theme of homeware, lifestyle, cultivating a space for yourself, and the Lulu and Georgia brand. The content that this brand publishes is valuable to its target consumers and relates to what they value, what they want to learn, and what they find entertaining.
This brand’s blog exemplifies that the higher the content quality, the more valuable it is to your audience; the more they engage with your business and spend time on your website, the more likely they are to develop trust in your brand and become a loyal consumer. Lulu and Georgia proves that developing a synergy between functional and aesthetic UX design and relevant content creation creates significant value for consumers and provides a seamless and enjoyable consumer experience.
